Modus, acquired by Compass, pioneered an innovative home closing technology platform that balances the needs of both buyers and real estate agents. As the Head of Product Design and first creative hire (employee number 4), I was entrusted with designing all aspects of the platform, focusing on collaboration, communication facilitation, and enabling transparency of the home closing process. My mission became to elevate the entire home closing process through clarity and a user-first experience.

For the unique opportunity of this product, I followed design thinking methodologies, in hopes of achieving seamless interactions across the entire experience. I remained hyper focused on the following tasks:

• Understanding the current experience
• Create user empathy through interviews and observations
• Mapping their journeys and paying close attention to their pain-points
• Design a solution to meet the users' needs while marrying proprietary technology
• Continuously gather user feedback to inform product development

Experience goals:
The goal was to create a single platform that showed transparency in the home buying and selling process, clarify the status of each task, provide access to all relevant documentation, and help the less industry-savvy users understand what was required from them.

Uncovered user needs:
However, my research indicated that external users (buyers/sellers and real state agents) and our internal escrow team required various experiences as their needs differ. Due to the limitations of our internal resources, we had to develop an interim one-size-fits-all solution, not ideal, but it served for the product launch purposes.

Our primary focus was to improve the speed to close the sale of homes and display with great simplicity relevant information and actions needed for all parties. As expected, during the first seven months, we made tweaks and changes to enhance the tool for our internal users as well for the external users.

After successfully using the platform for 7+ months and collecting user data, we knew it was time for a major redesign as the previous solution was not sustainable anymore for the growth of the company. We also took this opportunity to split the platform for internal users Vs. external users.

I spearheaded efforts to create two separate experiences to serve the external users and internal users' needs, as those differ.

Internal platform:
Instead of scrapping the previous learnings of our work, I took some of the previously validated concepts, such as adding an email extension feature and introduced it in the redesign. This became a successful feature for the escrow workforce.

External experience:
For external users, it was ket to highlight to-do’s, alerts, and messages. Pushing for transparency of the process and expressing the right communication at the right stage of the process.

The Modus digital solutions (and its end-to-end experience) has been received with excellent feedback by the different user groups. The work presented didn’t just solve user pain points—it helped improve operations, boosted client satisfaction, and fueled business growth.

The design solutions, strategies, and branded materials directly contributed to Modus securing $12.5M in Series A funding. Later, Modus was acquired by Compass, where our platform became a core part of their real estate ecosystem, streamlining the home-closing process for agents and buyers alike.